Barberton Makhonjwa Mountains

Some of the oldest rocks on the planet break the surface in the Barberton Makhonjwa Mountains of Mpumalanga: volcanic and sedimentary sequences laid down between 3.6 and 3.25 billion years ago, the best-preserved of their kind anywhere. Within them geologists read the conditions of the early Earth — ancient meteorite impacts, volcanism, the assembly of continents and the environments where life began. The property, covering 40 percent of the Barberton Greenstone Belt, was inscribed by UNESCO in 2018.